Huawei P40 Pro review

Where to buy

Huawei still finds itself in a tricky position when it comes to premium smartphones. It makes some of the best designs around, packs them with powerful processors and superb cameras… and then it all falls apart, as it did with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro when it comes to app support.

Huawei's still prohibited from trading with US companies, which means that while the Huawei P40 Pro is an "Android" phone, it lacks access to any and all Google services, including the Google Play store. Some of the methods that Huawei's promoting to get around this limitation are as novel as its hardware designs, but that still doesn't lead to a phone that's worth dropping $1,599 on.

Design

Design

• 90Hz display
• Noticeable camera holepunch
• Large rear camera array
• No headphone jack

• Read more about the Huawei P40 Pro's design

  Huawei's P-series flagships have long sold on the idea that they're "style" phones, available in a wide range of colours. Officially – at least in Australia – this year's range only comprises two colours, Deep Sea Blue and Silver Frost.

  I'm something of a sucker for dark blue phones, and the Deep Sea Blue model is quite striking, while also predictably being a magnet for fingerprints mere seconds after you pick it up. Huawei provides a simple clear case in the box with the P40 Pro, and unless you like looking at greasy fingerprint indents – no matter how much you clean your hands – it would be a good idea to slap that sucker on post-haste.

  The new design note this year is what Huawei calls its "waterfall" display. It's a 6.58-inch OLED with a 90Hz refresh rate, and while that's not quite market-leading, it's easily the most impressive display Huawei has packed into a phone to date. Huawei refers to it as a "waterfall" display because the edges curve around on all four sides, giving the impression of a wrap-around display. It's a small design touch that doesn't massively impact your day-to-day usage of the Huawei P40 Pro – but it's a nice touch nonetheless.

  There's a distraction at the front that's rather hard to ignore, though. Huawei's packed in a dual-lens front selfie camera into a hole-punch-style notch located at the top left of the P40 Pro's screen. Because the rest of the screen is so distraction-free, right down to an included and very fast in-display fingerprint sensor, your eyes can't help but be drawn to it. You can opt to hide the entire top "cutout" area by turning it all black, and many apps don't particularly address this screen area anyway – but it's a noticeable blemish.

  Around the back, this year's camera style is long and tall lens arrays, as we've already seen in phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and the P40 Pro follows this idea, albeit with a somewhat thinner array. There's a noticeable camera bump here, lessened somewhat if you throw the plastic case onto the Huawei P40 Pro. Huawei's argument is that sideways on, it more closely resembles a traditional camera, and maybe there's something to that, but it's still quite noticeable.

  Actual buttons are at a minimum, with simple power and volume controls on the right-hand side. Regrettably, there's no headphone jack, just a solitary USB C type charging port at the base, which is where the regular speakers also reside.

  The Huawei P40 Pro is IP68 rated for water resistance, although like many other manufacturers it does note that it's not specifically covered under warranty for water damage. Still, if you do get it wet – more on this later – it should be able to survive simple dunkings without issue.

Camera

Camera

• Exceptional still and video camera
• Great low light performance
• Easy to get creative shots

• See sample photos and read more about the Huawei P40 Pro's camera

  Huawei's tie-up with Leica has led to the Chinese maker outright leading the market in still photography, and with last year's Mate 30 Pro, it also joined competitively in the video space as well.

  The Huawei P40 Pro continues that journey, although it's worth noting that it's not actually the best Huawei P-series camera phone for 2020. That's the oddly named Huawei P40 Pro Plus handset, which features a five-camera set-up including dual telephoto lenses, a true first for mobile photography. There's no announced plans for release of the Huawei P40 Pro Plus in Australia at this stage.

  Which isn't to say that the Huawei P40 Pro is a slouch in the camera department. Round the back it's based around a primary 50MP wide sensor, matched up with a 40MP ultrawide sensor, 12MP 5x optical zoom periscope sensor and finally a time of flight sensor. It's essentially a tweak of the remarkable recipe found in the Huawei P30 Pro released in 2019, putting Huawei firmly back in the driver's seat when it comes to premium smartphone photography.

  I won't mince words here; the Huawei P40 Pro features the best stills camera I've tested on any smartphone to date.

  Huawei has added a number of new shooting modes, including – curiously – an underwater photography mode. The current coronavirus issues have rather prohibited my ability to duck up to the Great Barrier Reef to put it fully through its paces, but it's an unusual inclusion if only because Huawei's own warranty doesn't cover the phone itself for water ingress issues. It does warn you that you should use Huawei's waterproof phone case if you're going to use it that way, but still, it's irksome.

  I've said it before, but one of the reasons why I do like Huawei's photo app is because it encourages exploration of just what you can do with a mobile camera, from low-light night shots to traffic light trails, monochrome to aperture and more. Pro users can of course dip into the Pro menu and set their exposures precisely, but for the regular camera shooter, you don't have to work all that hard to get some really stunning shots from the rear of the Huawei P40 Pro.

  Video wasn't historically Huawei's strong point, with many of its phones providing motion with lots of shuddering effects along for the ride. The Huawei Mate 30 Pro fixed much of that, and thankfully I had few issues with video shooting on the Huawei P40 Pro, which supports up to 4K shooting from either the front or rear lenses.

  That wide hole-punch on the front might make you think that Huawei's copied a trick from the Google Pixel 3XL with a wide and ultrawide lens, but instead, it's housing a single 32MP wide lens and a depth sensor for portrait effects instead. Selfies from the Huawei P40 Pro were generally fine, with plenty of realistic depth, as well as a range of weird and wonderful spot effects. You can also ramp up the beauty mode sliders if you crave that plastic skin Instagram look.

  The Huawei P40 Pro features a periscope-style lens array for telephoto shooting, but that's been a feature of Huawei flagships all the way back to the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. The new feature here is up to 50x zoom, which is a lower level than, say, the Galaxy S20 Ultra's 100x zoom… but it's equally as useful.

  Which is to say that if you're after something to feel rather pervy when you take very long distance shots that look like they fell off the back of a 1990s era monitor, then they're fine, but for practical photo purposes, they're basically useless.

  

  That red splodge there is a flower, honestly.

  Huawei's hybrid zoom, using AI and the actual 5x optical length of the lens, goes up to 10x and is far more acceptable for everyday shooting purposes.

  The Huawei P30 Pro has remained my go-to phone for night shooting, but the current COVID-19 lockdown has rather put the kibosh on my usual comparative shooting set-up, which involves photography late at night at a local park.

  They're all shut, so I had to rig up a simpler test shooting from my deck verandah, putting the Huawei P40 Pro up against its predecessor, the Huawei P30 Pro, as well as Google's Pixel 4XL, Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra and Apple's iPhone 11 Pro Max phones.

  It is worth noting that every camera tested picked up far more light than my naked eye could because despite neighbourhood lights, it was a remarkably dark night. At least, for once, I wasn't walking around public places at night with thousands of dollars worth of phones in my bag.

  First up, Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra, a high-cost phone that's struggled in the past with low light shots:

  

  The S20 Ultra stays pretty dark and loses much of the trees around the scene, and that's with its low light night shooting mode engaged.

  On to Apple's iPhone 11 Pro Max, a phone that's seen some significant improvements in its low light performance thanks to software upgrades:

  

  The iPhone picks up more detail, but also a level of noise over a 3s exposure.

  Google's Pixel phones have long relied on Google's computational-led approach to night shooting. Here's the Google Pixel 4XL:

  

  It is still quite remarkable what Google can get out of almost no light, although as is common for Pixel phones, it does so with some slightly over-saturated tones that don't quite feel realistic.

  The P40 Pro is the successor to the P30 Pro, and that's pretty much my benchmark for quick night shooting. Here's the P30 Pro shooting with its "Supersensor" regular lens:

  

  Lots of detail, lots of leaves and just a little lens flare for this shot, which is still ultimately a pleasing affair.

  So how did the P40 Pro compare?

  

  The P40 Pro's regular camera does a great job in this case; while it loses the lens flare and a little of the light that the P30 Pro picked up, it's certainly not a worse low light shooter. However, that does rather point to an issue for the P40 Pro if you've got last year's phone because the low light shooting, while still great, isn't markedly better. It's just very, very good.

  Huawei P40 Pro sample photos

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• Kirin 990 is fast
• 5G ready
• App availability is basically broken

• View test results and read more about the Huawei P40 Pro's performance

  There are two ways to look at the Huawei P40 Pro's performance. On the strict hardware front there's an awful lot to like. The Huawei P40 Pro is built on Huawei's own Kirin 990 processor with in-built 5G connectivity, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. That is expandable if you want to, but like recent Huawei flagships it's via Huawei's own, more expensive nm memory card standard, not more affordable microSD. Huawei's yet to show any real world benefit to nm cards – beyond that to Huawei's own bank balance – so it's an annoying exclusion, if really only a minor one.

  In performance terms, the Huawei P40 Pro benchmarks – with a little difficulty, which I'll get to momentarily – quite well against competing flagships. Here's how it compares using Geekbench 5's CPU test:

  And here's how it compares using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme graphics benchmark:

  The Huawei P40 Pro is also notable for being the solitary flagship phone that still includes an IR blaster at the top of the phone. Why does that matter? Because it means you can use it as a near-universal smart remote control for any IR-controlled device, like your TV and many home air conditioners. Everyone else has largely abandoned this space, but it's super useful if you're not sure where the kids have left the remote this time around.

  The Huawei P40 Pro is also 5G capable, and I have to say "capable" here, because the current COVID-19 lockdown at the time of writing prohibited me from moving quite far enough into Sydney to engage with anyone's 5G network.

  During my review period, I was in 4G-only zones, so I can't quite say how comparatively fast or slow Huawei's own Balong 5G modem actually is compared to Qualcomm's equivalent X55 modem as found in any other 5G Australian handset. We're certainly at a time in Australia's 5G rollout where premium phones should come with 5G as standard, so it's good to see here, even if I couldn't particularly pace it during my review period.

  All of this is great in a phone that costs $1,599… until you get to the software.

  Like the Huawei Mate 30 Pro before it, the Huawei P40 Pro is an Android 10 phone running on Huawei's own EMUI10 platform. The learning curve for EMUI10 really isn't that large, and I don't have any fresh observations there in terms of utility. It's a launcher, it runs just fine once you concur with Huawei's design logic, and that's all there is to it.

  However, this is an Android 10 phone that's explicitly blocked from all Google Android services.

  That means no preinstalled Chrome, YouTube, Maps and other expected utilities that you'd find on literally any other Android phone. That also includes Google Pay, the Widevine security system many streaming services such as Netflix uses, and the Google Play store itself.

  Now, Huawei has done some considerable work in trying to mitigate this as an issue, suggesting no less than four different ways that you can get apps and services up and running on the Huawei P40 Pro.

  First and foremost is Huawei's AppGallery, its direct Google Play Store competitor. Huawei makes bold claims about the number of users and downloads it has here, but it's vital to keep it in perspective. The vast majority of those users are Chinese domestic phone users in a market where Google services are already blocked. They don't have an (official) choice, but you do.

  Unfortunately, the Huawei AppGallery is lacking in a lot of apps you might expect to find or want to install. This isn't just Google first-party content, but numerous popular social, gaming and streaming apps too.

  To make matters worse, there's a lot of junk apps cluttering up the AppGallery, making it harder to both browse and trust. When the first action game I'm presented with in games is – and I'm not making this up – "Taken WWE Real Fight" – with images ripped straight out of Street Fighter, I'm likely to be cautious of going down this route all too often.

  

  Huawei's next suggestion is to use its existing Phone Clone software – which it offered on phones back when it had full Google support – to transfer apps from your old Android phone to your new one.

  Phone Clone is smart enough to know that it won't run YouTube, Maps or other official Google properties, so those are greyed out when you try, but plenty of other apps for both fun and productivity on my existing Android phones appeared to transfer properly after only a short period of time. So… problem solved, right?

  Nope. Most of the games relied on Google in some way and either crashed on launch or refused to run at all. Popular apps such as TripView installed and let me pick between Sydney or Melbourne transit before declaring it wouldn't run without Google Play services anyway!

  I could get our standard benchmark apps to install, but it took multiple launch attempts before they would actually run. As such, while I've listed their figures above, I'm not 100% confident in their absolute veracity.

  Phone Clone also introduces the problem of quite how you're meant to update your apps, because they originally came out of Google Play Store, which isn't present on the P40 Pro. The only way that's going to work would be to update them on your original phone and then transfer them via Phone Clone when updates are presented, which is an incredibly tortuous way to keep your phone up to date and secure.

  Keeping on the track of staying secure, Huawei's next suggestion is to directly download the APKs from websites in order to run those apps where they're available. That's a terrible idea from a security standpoint.

  As with Phone Clone, there's then no in-built way to update those apps as you'd get through a full app store, but you're also relying on not being fooled by fake websites and installing direct malware onto your P40 Pro. Yes, it's something you can do with any Android phone – but you really shouldn't.

  Finally, if all else fails, Huawei suggests just using the web versions of services to access them. This is a way to watch YouTube, for example, and you can even log into a Google account this way if all else fails.

  However, it's clunky because the best you can do is set up a web page shortcut on the P40 Pro for quick access. One oddity in my Phone Clone adventures that did work without significant issue was Chrome alternative browser Brave, which I rather quickly defaulted to using over Huawei's own in-built browser app.

Battery life

Battery life

• 4,200mAh battery lasts a long time
• Very fast USB C charging
• Reverse wireless charging

• View test results and read more about the Huawei P40 Pro's battery life

  The Huawei P40 Pro packs in a 4,200mAh battery, exactly identical to last year's Huawei P30 Pro. Now, that's a phone with great battery endurance, so my hopes were high for the P40 Pro… but again I have to sound a couple of notes of caution.

  Running our standard battery endurance test was technically feasible. It involves streaming a 1080p YouTube video for a hour at maximum brightness and moderate volume to get a feel for how a phone runs its battery down, because all usage is relative.

  There are two problems here for the P40 Pro. Firstly, there's no preinstalled YouTube app, and you can't install it. That I could sidestep using the Brave browser and the YouTube mobile site – not quite the same thing, but close enough for basic usage.

  Then there's the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen YouTube drop available video quality well below 1080p. At the time of testing, the best I could get out of any device – not just the Huawei P40 Pro – was a 480p version of a video I've long used for battery testing.

  With those caveats in mind, here's how the Huawei P40 Pro compared:

  It's not entirely surprising then that relative day-to-day battery usage has seen the P40 Pro make it through a day's usage with more than 50% of the battery still intact, but here again I've got to sound a note of caution. That was with the limited stock of apps I could force onto the Huawei P40 Pro, so it wasn't quite the same as the usual run of social media, video, music and game apps I'd typically be running. I was locked out of 5G zones, so I couldn't assess the battery drain of those faster networks either.

  That being said, I've little doubt that it would make it through all but the most heavy duty days of usage. Huawei packs in its own proprietary charger for rapid wired charging, and Qi wireless charging is also supported.

  You also get reverse wireless charging, but outside of giving your battery powered toothbrush a boost – or perhaps a set of Huawei's own Freebuds 3 headphones – it's more of a party piece than something you'll use every day.

Verdict

Verdict

• Spectacular hardware, terrible software

Should you buy it?

No.

Now, I'm typically not that blunt, and it genuinely saddens me to write this. Huawei has come so far in hardware terms in just a handful of years, from a brand that made OEM devices for other brands to a budget Chinese maker to a producer of some of the planet's finest phone hardware.

At a hardware level, the P40 Pro is an excellent prospect. There's really nothing that touches it in camera terms, the processor is powerful and it's 5G ready without the hefty extra cost we see on so many other 5G-capable handsets. The design is maybe only just a tiny step up from the Huawei P30 Pro, but that was already a damned sexy handset in its own right.

However, at a software level, when you compare it to any other smartphone on the market, it's an utter trash fire. A $100 Android Go phone can run rings around it in terms of app availability, and while Huawei is certainly giving the idea of app portability a red hot go, none of its solutions work all that well. When you're dropping well north of a grand on a phone, the very last thing you should be doing is guesswork as to whether an app will be available, or if it'll run, or if you'll be able to update it in the future.

Alongside the Huawei P40 Pro, Huawei's also launching the cheaper Huawei P40 at $1,099. It's got the same core processor and a lesser camera, but it will also have the same Google and app issues as its bigger and pricier sibling. The same fate is true for the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.

It feels odd to say this, but a year on, the best phone Huawei makes for the Australian market is the one it launched a year ago. The Huawei P40 Pro's direct predecessor, the Huawei P30 Pro isn't quite as refined as the P40 Pro in hardware terms – but it's a considerably easier phone to like.

Pricing and availablility

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Specifications